Women
Political Roles of Iranian Village Women
Masses of Iranian women, many of them “traditional,” relatively uneducated and from the lower classes, were politically quite active in the Iranian revolution. Many observers assume this to be without precedent. There is, however, a tradition of political participation and struggle in community politics by women, as the case of the village of Aliabad illustrates. Women’s activities, roles and characteristics in local politics were similar to those they exhibited in the Iranian revolution. These village women were not radically departing from their usual behavior by supporting the revolution and joining marches in the nearby city of Shiraz.
Insurrectionary Women
The study of women and politics has usually focused on the participation of women in the formal political arena — that is, in politics as practiced by political parties, by people holding political office or, at most, by political opposition movements. In the Middle East context in particular, the modern history of women in politics has been limited, by and large, to study of the role women played in the various nationalist movements in the region.
Women and Politics in the Middle East
How are Middle East women political and how do they participate in states, movements, revolts and revolutions? Few activities of ordinary people are inherently political. How something comes to be seen as political at times and non-political at other times, and who gets to define it as such, are basic questions. Neither women nor men are political or apolitical in the abstract. How their activities come to carry a political charge must be understood in the context of their particular histories and cultures.
Molyneux, State Policies and the Position of Women Workers in the PDRY
Maxine Molyneux, State Policies and the Position of Women Workers in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, 1966-1977 (Geneva: International Labor Office, 1982).
Looking Across the Mediterranean
"Femmes de la Mediterranée," Peuples Mediterraneens/Mediterranean Peoples 22-23 (January-June 1983).
Women and Labor Migration
Women are now the heads of between 25 and 35 percent of all households in developing countries. [1] In the Middle East and North Africa, women head about 16 percent of all households. [2] One main reason for the increasing number of households headed by women is male migration to seek work outside their own countries, unaccompanied by their wives and children. When male villagers from Egypt emigrate, they do so without their families. [3] For one thing, a large number emigrate illegally, with neither official work contracts nor legal residence in countries of employment. It is much easier for them to move alone and leave their families behind.
Yemeni Workers Abroad
In Yemen one often hears the hypothesis that as men migrate abroad in search of work, women move into male economic and political roles, at least within the household. The assumption is that women take over production tasks and decisionmaking which have always been the responsibility of men. While this may well be happening in some communities in Yemen, the evidence in one village of Ta‘izz province, in the southern part of the country, suggests that the domestic effects of migration might not be simply to “fill the vacuum” created by the absence of men. [1]
Egyptian Migration and Peasant Wives
In the 1960s, Egypt supplied the labor markets of the Middle East with professionals and administrators seconded by the government. Carefully regulated and controlled, the export of labor was consistent both with Egypt’s policies in the area and with its own manpower needs. In the 1970s, government-seconded labor was overtaken in volume by a huge and largely unregulated flow of labor at all skill levels. By 1975, Egypt had overtaken Yemen as the major exporter of labor in the area, and its share of the total Arab migrant labor market had reached one third. By 1980, Egypt had at least doubled its migrant stock, an estimated 10 percent of which are women.
Women’s Organizations in Ethiopia
One of the more positive political themes that the exiled students brought back from their studies was a special emphasis on the need for the emancipation of women. A Women’s Committee operated within POMOA. As late as 1977, official state documents were stressing the double oppression of women, as workers and women. This was in contrast to the more orthodox theory of the Eastern European countries that became official policy in 1978. In the countryside, moreover, the establishment of peasant associations went together with the setting up of local women’s associations. Nearly all women had been integrated into these structures by 1980, and women appear to have participated quite widely in the peasant associations.
Tawil, My Home, My Prison
Ramonda Hawa Tawil, My Home, My Prison (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979).
This book is the autobiography of a woman in revolt, but whose revolt is accidental. Although its title suggests a high degree of political awareness, the author conveys very little of the depth and impact of the struggle of the Palestinian people under Zionist occupation. The sole virtue of the book is to expose the self-centered elitist political perspective of the author. This is worth something, considering how the occupation authorities and the Western media have, each in their own way, conveyed the impression that she is a militant champion of the Palestinian struggle.
Poems for the Women of Egypt
The Future and the Ancestor
The dead’s right grain
ls woven in our flesh
within the channels of the blood
Sometimes we bend
beneath the fullness of ancestors.
But the present that shatters walls,
banishes boundaries
and invents the road to come,
rings on.
Right in the center of our lives
liberty shines,
begets our race
and sows the salt of words.
Let the memory of blood
be vigilant but never void the day.
Let us precede ourselves
across new thresholds.
—Andrée Chedid
Honor
I am a woman…
The Cares of Umm Muhammad
Nagya Muhammad al-Bakr — known as Umm Muhammad, mother of Muhammad — is 37 years old and works as a hospital attendant in the Heart Institute in Imbaba, Cairo. She is married to Bayoumi ‘Abd al-Baqi and has eight children. This interview, excerpted and translated from the Arabic by MERIP editor Judith Tucker, was published in the Egyptian journal al-Tali‘a in February 1976.
Where are you from?
From the peasantry. Our village is Minya al-Ghamh, in the province of Sharqiyya, and I’m from the ‘izba of Shalshamun. We came to Cairo twenty years ago.
Can you read and write?
Textile Workers of Shubra al-Khayma
Dire material necessity is increasingly forcing Egyptian women to take up wage labor. Job conditions are poor, pay is low and social sanctions are heavy. Women make up 12 percent of the Egyptian industrial workforce, concentrated in textiles, food industries and pharmaceuticals. In textiles, an important Egyptian industry, their present numbers and their historical role are quite substantial.
